Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large
ISSN 1534-0937
Libraries · Policy · Technology · Media

Selection from Cites & Insights 9, Number 6: May 2009

Bibs & Blather

Two Million and Counting

Cites & Insights reached a milestone this year—twice. That milestone: Two million words. That’s the equivalent of anywhere from 20 to 40 typical books. It is, by any measure, a lot of blather.

I say “twice” because the past year included a fair amount of republishing, and there had been some of it before. As a raw count—including all occurrences of the masthead, “Inside this Issue” and repeated material—the count passed two million words in the January 2009 issue. Excluding “Inside this issue,” the masthead and repeated material longer than a paragraph or so, the count passed two million words in April 2009. The difference, roughly 97,000 words, accounts for just under five percent of the material.

Through January 2009, the issues totaled just under 2,500 pages; through April, just over 2,600. Page and word counts exclude the annual indices and the phantom Cites on a Plane issue.

Overall Readership

There’s a nice certainty to the word count and page count. After that, things get a little fuzzy. Cites & Insights began on the webspace that came with my AT&T dialup account; no usage figures were available. I really have no idea what the readership was like for the first two years—except that there was enough feedback to keep it going.

From late 2002 (the first issue in volume 3, published in December 2002) through early August 2006, Cites & Insights was hosted by Boise State University Libraries. During that time, there were just under 487,000 pageviews in some 546,000 sessions, representing 141,120 unique IP addresses from 157 different countries and other top-level domains.

Since mid-August 2006 (the September 2006 issue), Cites & Insights has had its own domain, hosted on LISHost. But the domain moved in mid-March 2009 from one server to another, making for a discontinuity in logging. As far as I can tell, from mid-August 2006 through mid-March 2009, there were around 808,000 pageviews in 270,000 sessions, representing just under 76,000 unique IP addresses from 158 countries and other top-level domains.

The higher pageview count and lower session count make sense: HTML versions didn’t begin until 2006 (with some retrospective conversion). It’s hard to say whether readership is growing, shrinking or roughly the same—although those numbers might suggest some shrinkage.

Most Widely-Read Issues

These figures are at best a little fuzzy, since they entirely omit the first two years and come from two different statistical packages. They’re also complicated by the HTML factor. So let’s call this “most widely-downloaded full issues from December 2002 through early March 2009.” Note that I’ve excluded PDF pageviews; to the extent that people can view PDFs without downloading them, issue readership may be undercounted.

The hot pair

You already know the most widely-downloaded issue: Volume 6 Issue 2, Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0,” with 21,952 downloads (not including all the HTML views). One other issue shows more than 10,000 downloads: Volume 3 Issue 9, Midsummer 2003. That’s also a special issue: Coping with CIPA: A Censorware Special.

A dozen issues have been downloaded 6,000 to 8,000 times. In descending order, there are four with more than 7,000 downloads: Volume 4 Issue 12, Volume 3 Issue 14, Volume 5 Issue 10, Volume 3 Issue 8. Eight more have 6,000 to 7,000: Volume 6 Issue 10, Volume 4 Issue 3, Volume 4 Issue 2, Volume 3 Issue 11, Volume 3 Issue 12, Volume 3 Issue 1, the Volume 2 index, and Volume 4 Issue 1. I have no idea what (if anything) makes these issues special.

Notably, these are mostly older issues; Cites & Insights issues keep accumulating readership over time. Another 13 issues (including one index) have from 5,000 to 5,999 downloads—and those are all from volumes 3, 4 and 5. (Looked at pessimistically, this would suggest that 2003 through 2005 were the glory years and I should quit—but I prefer “readership builds over time.”) Twenty more issues and indexes have 4,000 to 4,877 downloads.

Of the 123 issues through mid-March 2009 (115 issues plus eight indexes), 12 have fewer than 1,000 downloads and 25 have fewer than 2,000. My checkpoint for “enough readers” has, informally, been 700 or so—and no issue that’s been around more than four months fails to hit that target. Four of the 12 low-readership issues come from 2001 and 2002, meaning that many readers aren’t counted.

Most Widely-Read Recent Essays

If the issue download counts are a little fuzzy thanks to multiple sites, it gets worse for essay readership. I’ve added the HTML pageviews for essays (or, in one case, PDF downloads for the separate essay PDF) to the PDF downloads for the issues in which those essays appeared. In some special-issue cases, I didn’t prepare an HTML separate—and, of course, there aren’t any HTML separates for the first three years.

Articles with more than 8,000 “readers.”

Article	Readers	Title
v6i2a	39,460	Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0”
v5i10b	20,020	Perspective: Investigating the Biblioblogosphere
v6i10a	14,476	Perspective: Looking at Liblogs: The Great Middle
v5i13a	12,954	Perspective: Life Trumps Blogging
v4i12a	10,758	Perspective: Wikipedia and Worth
v5i10d	10,575	(C)2 Perspective: Orphan Works
v5i5a	10,422	Bibs & Blather
v4i12c	10,076	Offtopic Perspective: The Rest of the DoubleDoubles
v4i12b	9,996	Copyright Currents
v4i3c	9,804	PC Progress, July 2003-January 2004
v4i12d	9,786	Interesting & Peculiar Products
v4i12e	9,706	Copyright Perspective: IICA: Inducing to Infringe
v7i2c	9,672	Perspective: Conference Speaking: I Have a Little List
v6i4a	9,642	Perspective: Folksonomy and Dichotomy
v4i12f	9,554	Trends & Quick Takes
v7i1b	8,970	Perspective: Book Searching: OCA/GBS Update
v6i4d	8,935	PC Progress, October 2005-February 2006
v5i3b	8,934	The Library Stuff
v5i7d	8,716	Ethical Perspective: Weblogging Ethics and Impact
v6i10b	8,566	Bibs & Blather
v4i3f	8,498	Interesting & Peculiar Products
v5i7e	8,434	ACRL 2005: What's Next? Academic Libraries in a Google Environment
v6i3a	8,366	Followup Perspective: Beyond Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0”
v6i3e	8,300	(C)2 Perspective: What NC Means to Me
v6i1e	8,220	(C)2 Perspective: Will Fair Use Survive?
v5i5c	8,202	PC Progress, November 2004-March 2005
v6i4b	8,198	The Library Stuff
v5i7a	8,163	(C)3 Perspective: FMA: Watching the Way You Want
v6i9a	8,141	Bibs & Blather
v6i4e	8,120	Offtopic Perspective: 50-Movie All Stars Collection 1
v5i5b	8,092	(C)4: Locking Down Technology
v5i5d	8,051	Interesting & Peculiar Products

Articles with 7,000 to 7,999 “readers”

v5i14a	7,961	Perspective: OCA and GLP 1: Ebooks, Etext, Libraries and the Commons
v4i1b	7,930	Ebooks, Etext and PoD
v5i3f	7,930	Session Reports: ALA Midwinter 2005
v6i7a	7,896	Perspective: Books, Blogs & Style
v6i4c	7,888	(C)1: Term & Extent
v6i1c	7,846	Interesting & Peculiar Products
v4i4d	7,837	The Censorware Chronicles
v4i1c	7,824	Copyright Currents
v4i4e	7,784	Library Stuff Book Perspective: Scholarly Publishing
v4i4a	7,779	Library Access to Scholarship
v4i11a	7,744	Perspective: The Quality Contradiction
v5i10c	7,700	Perspectives: Summertime Blahs
v6i1b	7,686	Followup Perspective: OCA and GLP Redux
v6i3c	7,657	Library Stuff Perspective: Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources
v6i7e	7,646	Library Access to Scholarship
v5i10a	7,642	Bibs & Blather
v6i3b	7,625	(C)4 Perspective: Analog Hole and Broadcast Flag
v5i4b	7,536	Perspective: The Dangling Conversation
v4i11b	7,445	The Library Stuff
v4i13b	7,407	Perspective: RSS and Multimodes Revisited
v7i1d	7,402	Finding a Balance: Patrons and the Library
v4i11c	7,384	Library Stuff Perspective: Information Commons?
v6i6a	7,384	Perspective: Discovering Books
v6i1f	7,364	Trends & Quick Takes
v4i13d	7,335	Perspectives: Three Brief Pieces
v4i13c	7,247	Library Access to Scholarship
v4i13a	7,162	The Library Stuff
v6i1a	7,146	Bibs & Blather
v6i1d	7,118	Following Up and Feedback
v5i4c	7,083	Offtopic Perspective: Family Classics 50 Movie Pack, Part 1
v5i6b	7,082	disContent Perspective: Readability
v4i11d	7,075	The Good Stuff
v4i3d	7,004	Copyright Perspective: Compulsory Licensing
v6i5a	7,004	Perspectives: Seventyfive Facets

In addition, 52 articles appear to have 6,000 to 6,999 readers and 42 have 5,000 to 5,999.

Conclusions?

Not many. I haven’t tried grouping articles by topic to see whether some topics are more popular than others, partly because I don’t think basic readership should be the controlling factor in how Cites & Insights works.

My general conclusion is that, despite fewer links from other sites than issues used to get, Cites & Insights still has enough readers—and is generally still enough fun—to be worth doing. Thanks to all of you for keeping it that way.

The Rest of the Issue

I can take a hint. Maybe not rapidly, but I can take a hint. When I’ve studied liblogs and reported the results here, for free, the articles have been widely read—more than 14,000 apparent readers in one case, more than 20,000 in another case. (See above.)

When I’ve tried to do that in book form, for a modest charge, not so much: To date, 80 copies of Public Library Blogs and 45 copies of Academic Library Blogs. The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 isn’t quite burning up the market, either, with 50 copies to date, but it’s a year newer.

Some authors find that making some or all of their books available for free improved sales of the print books. I don’t expect that to be the case for the two library blog books. In retrospect, they were not as well thought out as they could have been. If I was doing them again, they’d have more in common with The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008—but would that make any difference?

What I’m doing here is offering most of the “first half” of each library blog book for free, with almost no editing. I’m not including the individual blog descriptions and samples. I’m also not including the complete lists of blogs and institutions, since those serve no real purpose outside book form (and are already available in .xls form on the web in any case). Will I offer the “first half” of the Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 in a later issue (which, all by itself, would be a large issue)? Hard to say.

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, Volume 9, Number 6, Whole Issue 116, ISSN 1534-0937, a journal of libraries, policy, technology and media, is written and produced by Walt Crawford, Editorial Director of the Library Leadership Network.

Cites & Insights is sponsored by YBP Library Services, http://www.ybp.com.

Opinions herein may not represent those of Lyrasis or YBP Library Services.

All original material in this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/1.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

URL: citesandinsights.info/civ9i6.pdf

Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large ISSN 1534-0937 Libraries · Policy · Technology · Media